Thursday, 10 May 2018

My Beautiful Eyes & The Angry Little Man

I love Kat Von D. I don’t really know much about her professional or personal life, but she has revolutionised my face. Switching to a vegan diet was easy. It took me a while to learn the names of hidden animal ingredients and it took me ages to find a vegan snickers alternative, but aside from that, it was pretty easy. I thought I’d struggle to give up cheese, I thought I’d miss having milk in my tea, or that Christmas without a Terry’s chocolate orange would be miserable, but it was all fine.

The thing I did struggle with was makeup. Back in 2009, it was impossible to find good vegan makeup. You had to order things off the internet and hope they would be amazing, but they never were. The mascaras ran, the foundations were too dry and the eyeliners smudged away to nothingness. Finding good vegan food was easy, but decent makeup was proving more of a challenge. I quizzed experienced vegans on their makeup brands, I did many Googles and I tried a lot of makeup.

Then Kat Von D changed my life. Her stuff is amazing. It is the future of vegan makeup. I have an ink eyeliner from there that is like an actual tattoo it stays on so well. And last week I picked up a pencil eyeliner (I am all about the eyeliner) and it was the most amazing eyeliner I have ever used in my whole life ever and I am 32 so that’s a lot of life. All her stuff is vegan and cruelty-free, but it is also amazing and stays on and doesn’t look crap. What more could a vegan want? Blue lips? She’s got you covered.

I love Kat Von D because she made me ageing eyes look good (not an easy task). I don’t know who she is or what she stands for. I don’t really care as long as she doesn’t give me panda eyes. She is vegan though so that’s pretty good because it means she’s probably someone I agree with on a lot of issues. Although, actually, you can’t exactly take that for granted.

One thing I’ve noticed in the vegan movement is that there are a surprising number of folks who don’t share my viewpoint on many issues. Sexism is rife in the vegan movement, something which is pretty upsetting to see. And racism often rears its ugly head in the comments box in vegan groups. Not to mention there’s a lot of pro-life vegans (apparently, if you care about an actual pig, you should care about a clump of human cells that can’t feel pain, um). And, as the polar opposite of that sector the vegan movements, there are the antinatalists. These are the vegans who don’t believe in having kids - and not in an ‘I don’t want kids myself but you guys do what you like’ kind of a way, in more of a ‘having children is wrong and anyone who does it is terrible’ way.

Don’t have kids, have kids, whatever, do what makes you happy. But don’t waste time worrying about what other people are doing. And definitely, don’t go round telling parents that they’re not vegan because they have kids. Er, yeah, so apparently that’s a thing now. You see, Kat Von D is pregnant and she announced it on Instagram with a sweet photo and a blue heart and she got a shitload of abuse from angry vegans. Not all the vegans were angry, some of them were lovely and said congratulations. You know, the normal ones. But the abnormal ones stood out a little more because their comments were so misplaced on a pregnancy announcement photo.

Someone commented, "Congrats on undoing your veganism almost tenfold.” So, yeah, that was nice. Way to go, the vegan movement, for making us all look like a bunch of dicks, yet again. Oh, and, obvs it was a man who said it, because, you know, it’s necessary for a random man to have an opinion on what any woman does or doesn’t do with her reproductive organs. Being vegan and choosing not to have kids for the planet are separate things. Being child-free is not a requisite of being vegan. There is a real problem in the vegan movement at the moment with this, there are some very loud and aggressive voices constantly shouting that nobody should be having children. This atmosphere has made some vegan parents, or wannabe vegan parents, feel unwelcome in vegan spaces and that’s not exactly a good thing, is it? If we want to encourage more people to take up veganism, and if we want to make veganism as accessible as possible, and encourage this next generation of vegans to actually be vegan, then we need to welcome them into the movement and allow them to be a part of it.

It’s not up to random Instagram users what makes a person vegan or not, I’m pretty sure that’s already been decided by the Vegan Society. And, I would argue, with my amazing smokey eyes, that Kat Von D has already done more for the vegan movement than some angry little man on Instagram. Being an aggressive, hostile little twat isn’t making anybody want to be a part of the vegan movement, if anything, it’s just showing them that the vegan movement is as flawed as the rest of the society. Those angry little white men just seem to get just about everywhere, don’t they?